The abandoned apartment block didn't echo with the sounds of a struggle. It was dead silent.
That was the first warning.
When they reached the third floor, Jin-Woo stopped. The door to apartment 304 wasn't locked. It wasn't even closed. It stood slightly ajar, a black void waiting at the end of the flickering hallway.
"She's not hiding," Tae-Soo whispered, his breath catching. "She's waiting."
Jin-Woo pushed the door open.
The room was bathed in shadows. In the center of the empty living room, a girl in her early twenties sat perfectly still on a broken wooden chair. Her clothes were torn, and dark, dried blood stained her collar. She didn't jump. She didn't scream. She just slowly raised her head.
[Human-Linked Node Detected][Stability: 62%][Emotional State: Hostile]
Before the blue text could even fully form, she moved.
It wasn't a desperate scramble; it was an eerily silent, explosive blur of motion. She closed the distance in a fraction of a second, a rusted, sharpened pipe aimed directly at Jin-Woo's chest.
Seo-Ah reacted, swinging her metal bat in a wide arc to intercept.
CRACK.
The bat connected solidly with the girl's ribs. It was a sickening sound—bones definitely fractured. But the girl didn't even flinch. She didn't gasp. Completely ignoring the devastating impact, she used the momentum of Seo-Ah's swing to pivot, sliding past the bat and driving her makeshift blade upward.
Jin-Woo twisted away, but he was too slow. The rusted metal sliced deep into his upper arm, tearing through his jacket and drawing a hot spray of blood.
Jin-Woo hissed, stepping back and grabbing her wrist. Her physical strength was terrifying, but her eyes were worse. They were dead, clouded with a hollow, absolute paranoia. She wasn't fighting to survive. She was fighting because her body was operating on a completely different set of rules.
As their eyes locked, a jagged line of text burned into Jin-Woo's vision.
[External Faith Detected][Target Bound to: ???]
Jin-Woo's breath caught. He stared at the girl. She wasn't a wild survivor. She was already tethered. The Predator didn't just consume people; he planted seeds. He left traces behind like landmines.
"Who did this to you?" Jin-Woo demanded, twisting her wrist to drop the blade.
She finally spoke. Her voice was an emotionless, raspy whisper. "It doesn't matter. He's coming back for his harvest."
Suddenly, the temperature in the room plummeted so fast their breath turned to thick fog. The windows didn't shatter; they spider-webbed with frost in an instant. The ambient noise of the city outside was completely vacuumed away, leaving a deafening, unnatural silence. The air pressure spiked, making Tae-Soo drop to his knees, clutching his bleeding ears.
[Marked Status: Reacting][Interference Detected]
The girl's eerie calmness shattered. She collapsed to the floor, her back arching in absolute agony. A dual-layered scream tore from her throat—her human voice mixed with the sickening, digital static of a corrupted system.
Thick, jagged lines of blood-red static erupted from beneath the skin of her neck, crawling up toward her eyes. It was the Predator's aura, eating her alive from the inside out, reacting to the presence of Jin-Woo's network.
"It's a trap!" Tae-Soo yelled over the static, his glasses cracked from the pressure. "He left her here as bait! If you link to her, that corruption will travel up the tether! It will infect you!"
"Jin-Woo, let her go! We leave now!" Seo-Ah pleaded, backing away from the terrifying red glow.
Jin-Woo didn't move. He stood over the writhing girl, bleeding from his arm, staring at the crimson static consuming her.
If he walked away, she would turn into one of those corrupted monsters. If he connected, the Predator's poison would enter his own system.
Jin-Woo's eyes darkened, the last shred of his naive humanity burning away in the freezing room.
I'm not saving her, Jin-Woo thought, his expression turning to stone. I'm using her.
He knelt down and slammed his bare hand directly over the thickest cluster of red corruption on her neck.
[Forced Link Attempt][System Conflict Detected]
BAM.
A shockwave of pure agony blasted up Jin-Woo's arm. The red static bit into his flesh like a swarm of barbed wire. It wasn't just a clash of auras; the Predator's trace actively counter-attacked. Jin-Woo tasted ash and rusted iron. He could feel his own blue system code being violently overwritten, his vision flickering red and black.
The girl shrieked as the ethereal blue of Jin-Woo's divinity slammed into the suffocating crimson, turning her body into a digital battlefield.
You won't take her, Jin-Woo roared in his mind, forcing every ounce of his remaining authority down the tether. The blue energy flared, encasing the red corruption, burning his own soul to wall off the infection.
With a deafening crack, the pressure vanished. The red glow receded, compressed into a single, pulsing dark bruise on the girl's neck, wrapped in heavy blue chains of Jin-Woo's system.
Jin-Woo collapsed backward onto the floor, gasping for air, his right arm completely numb and trailing faint wisps of black smoke.
The silence rushed back in.
Hae-In lay on her side, panting heavily. She slowly pushed herself up, her bloodshot eyes focusing on Jin-Woo. She didn't look grateful. She looked at him with the terrifying realization that she had just traded a butcher for a warden.
Jin-Woo forced himself to look at the system prompt blinking in his vision. He expected fatigue. He expected a temporary debuff.
Instead, the text was a jagged, horrifying purple.
[Link Established: Partial][Sync Rate: 12%][Authority Fragment Permanently Corrupted: 2%]
Jin-Woo froze. Not lost. Corrupted. A piece of his own soul was now forever tainted by the Predator's system.
[Warning][Network Integrity Compromised][Predator Trace Embedded]
He had gained a powerful, dangerous node. But as Jin-Woo felt the faint, malicious pulse of the red trace echoing inside his own chest, he realized the horrifying truth of his choice.
I didn't just save her... Jin-Woo thought, wiping the blood from his arm. I let him in.